The music business may close down for the holidays with hardly any new releases in early January but there are still new videos coming out like the three below. Also below E-Lit at the Amoeba Berkeley store shares his top ten picks of the past year as well as his predictions for 2013 in hip-hop. Skillz just dropped "2012 Rap Up" but announced publicly and in the song that it will be his very last annual "rap up" after ten years and doing his anticipated year in review songs - and seen others enter the year-rap up field like popular YouTube rapper DeStorm

The videos below include the new Kev Brown produced track from Sean Born "Grandeur," and the brand new (two day old) video for the newest Hiero joint: Opio + Pep Love's (aka First Light) song "Lighters" from the duo's forthcoming debut album Fallacy Fantasy which will arrive in Amoeba March 12th. Immediately below is the new video from SF hip-hop crew BPos for their song "Balance" (from the group's last release Pos Tapes Volume Three). The video was filmed by Inkfat and BPos during BPos' 2012 Super Hero Pool Party Tour, and the song's beat is by AspectMcCarthy (ghosNOTES) while the video itself was made by BPos member Goodword.

To know Anticon is to love Anticon. I’m sure casual Anticon fans exist; but by and large we are an obsessive breed; comparative, in some ways, to those that follow the Manson Family—you mention a trivial fact and eyes widen, speech accelerates with enthusiasm, rattling off dates, facts, and slogans. Anticon is that level of obsession without the creepiness—finding a fellow devotee is finding a new friend for life.

Anticon is an independent hip-hop record label, initially based in the Bay Area and founded in the late ‘90s. Similar to other hip-hop “crews,” they’ve released records as individual bands or performers, but other artists make guest appearances on nearly every release (of which there are MANY. Every artists is wildly prolific). Founding members of Anticon include Doseone, Jel, Sole, Alias, Pedestrian, Odd Nosdam, Telephone Jim Jesus, and Why?. Combined project acts of these individual artists include Themselves, Subtle, cLOUDDEAD, Greenthink, and Deep Puddle Dynamics. The combinations continue: Themselves + German indie band The Notwist = 13 & God, and Sole’s solo project that is now post-Anticon is Sole and the Skyrider Band.

Anticon is not gangster rap, nor is it minority self-empowerment hip-hop. It is surreal, experimental, and by far the most exciting music to emerge from any genre in the past ten years. Someartists that began with hip-hop have moved on to sounds more electronic or pop, like Alias’ Muted or Why?’s Elephant Eyelash. Doseone’s apocalyptic, rapid-fire poetics have been placed against both drum machine and electric cello. cLOUDDEAD created a singeable melody out of the lyrics “It's hard to stand the sight of two dogs dead under a sky so blue/You have to stop the blood to your head/to fit the breath in front of you.” If anything, the maturity and spread of Anticon’s artists geographically and genre-wise has only enhanced their accessibility and confirmed their initial manifesto of Music for the Advancement of Hip-Hop.